Brachos 56 – ברכות נו

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Today’s Daf Yomi Question:

The Gemara relates that Rava spent the day in the Beis Hamedrash, apparently to avoid receiving the blows foretold by Bar Hedya.  What was the purpose of doing this; since Rava knew it would be fulfilled regardless?

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One thought on “Brachos 56 – ברכות נו

  1. Abaye and Rava both say regarding ha’oleh le’gag that once he rises to prominence he remains in his status. It’s interesting that they seemed to have developed some knowledge of dream interpretation. Could they have had some prior familiarity with some of the aspects of dream interpretation? We don’t know if this was before or after Bar Hedya. Could it have been that, as with R. Katina and the Ov necromancer (I would suppose that R. Katina wanted to demonstrate from the start that the Ov fellow was a fake and therefore set him up with a question for which he already had the answer) that this was a sort of controlled experiment to show that Bar Hedya interpreted the dream strictly based on his own payday. They might have known that this was his trick and wanted to show that the same dream had the same outcome. What they may not have known is what Rava found out to his misfortune –the outcomes were indeed NOT the same, but were based on the interpretation itself. Perhaps Rava persisted in his dealing with Bar Hedya because he could not understand why Bar Hedya’s interpretations turned out to be true even though he (Rava) knew that Bar Hedya was clearly a fraud. His anger at finding out the secret must have been monumental and we have no sympathy for Bar Hedya’s dismal end.

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